Reply 80 of 113, by leejsmith
mogwaay wrote on 2022-08-26, 10:10:feipoa wrote on 2022-08-26, 06:02:I was wondering if the OP has tried to read from the floppy drive once the system is already booted to the DOS prompt, or if the […]
I was wondering if the OP has tried to read from the floppy drive once the system is already booted to the DOS prompt, or if the issue is specific to booting from a floppy disk? As it sounded like you are also having DMA sound issues, our failure modes are likely different, but I thought I'd toss in my experience a similar problem when using a VLSI 200 series 286 motherboard.
I have notes indicating that on my system, which doesn't have any trace damage, that booting to the floppy w/Harris or Intel 286 installed doesn't work, but floppy read would work once the system was already booted. I also noted that replacing the Harris 286 CPU with an 486SLC based upgraded, it allowed bootable access to the floppy. I thought that there might be some issue with my particular board, but another member here has the same board and noted the same symptoms. Thus, if you happen to have a 386 or 486 upgrade chip, it might be worth trying. Also try reading from the floppy once already booted. And try different diskette drives/cables. I've run into cases where certain 286-thru socket 5 systems didn't like some disk drives.
Source:
Re: Evergreen 486 SuperChip - settings for DIP switch?feipoa wrote on 2021-12-08, 18:43:What has been perplexing me about my 286 is that it cannot boot from floppies using a standard Harris 286-12 or 286-16 CPU. It tries to boot, but just hangs there. If I boot to a DOS prompt using the HDD, I can use the 1.44M floppy drive just fine. The interesting part of this observation was that if I use the SuperChip 486SLC CPU, I can boot to 1.44M floppies without issue. What could be causing the system not to boot to floppies with a standard Harris 286?
I think Lee (OP) had same issues whether he was booting or in DOS. He could read 1 sector files fine in DOS but not larger. He also showed a clip trying to boot a floppy and it seemed to work initially but then crashed (I think it was a bootable version of OMNIDISK, maybe FreeDOS based boot floppy?). Nice ideas tho, maybe he could try a new CPU?
How easy is it to find a 286 chip ?